Love is a many splendoured thing; it influences most of our music and art, and Poets would even have us believe that it is beyond comprehension. Although Evolutionary scientists would no doubt be keen to point out that Love has evolved to help keep pairs bonded together.

As to the question of what is Love? Neuroscientist Larry Young believes that he may have the answer. Writing in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature, Professor Young argues that Love is a series of neurochemical events in specific brain areas, and has a “biological basis that we can understand”.

Professor Young, of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, analyzed the responses of North American Prairie Voles (which, unlike most other animals, form lifelong pairs and raise their young together) to various chemicals, and found that a dose of the right hormone could drastically alter their relationships.

Oxytocin is one of the main hormones involved in generating feelings of love, especially in females. But, Prairie voles artificially injected with large quantities of Oxytocin were found to be very likely to become strongly attached to the first male they encountered – whereas, in the case of males, larger amounts of Vasopressin triggered bonding and nesting effects.

Extrapolating the results obtained with Voles to Humans, Professor Young believes that using this knowledge, a theoretical love potion could be manufactured, which would make the consumer fall in love with the first person that he or she encountered. All that the “cocktail” would do, says Young, would be to trigger a “biochemical chain of events” that would ensure that whoever drank it was convinced that the other person was the right one for him or her. Conversely, an anti-love vaccine could also be invented as an antidote to unrequited love, by reversing the principles that lead to the creation of the love drug in the first place.

Professor Young noted:

If we give an Oxytocin blocker to female voles, they become like 95 percent of other mammal species. They will not bond no matter how many times they mate with a male or how hard he tries to bond. They mate, it feels really good and they move on if another male comes along. If love is similarly Biochemically based, you should in theory be able to suppress it in a similar way.

These experiments have not been conducted on humans, and Professor Young does not advocate that they should be, although he does note:

It would be completely unethical to give the drug to someone else, but if you’re in a marriage and want to maintain that relationship, you might take a little booster shot yourself every now and then. Even now it’s not such a far-out possibility that you could use drugs in conjunction with marital therapy.

However, Professor Young claims that his ultimate goal is not to create a love drug, but to shed light on serious conditions like Autism – by studying brain chemicals involved in emotional attachment. Thus, a milder form of the theoretical love substance might be used to endow Schizophrenics and Autistics with more social skills, in order to help them better integrate into society, and help stop them becoming a burden for others.

Finally, regarding love, Professor Young is convinced that love does not simply boil down to one single hormone. There have been studies where it has been shown that differences in a cluster of genes known as the Major Histocompatibility Complex may be involved in initial sexual attraction, Young pointed out. Adding that variations in this gene cluster have predicted the quality of the relationship between the male vole and its partner.

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Posted by Jonathan in Biochemistry, Biology

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